The 77.5 is roughly 20% of the settlement fund
Or if you want to include the crap credit monitoring it is 11% of the total 700
In either case no one will be getting near 125 but still 80 million is quite a lot for them...
Equifax should pay damages related to the severity of the breach not to the size of their bank account.
Against $3.5bln in 2019 revenues? That's not really a lot at all.
If the two sides negotiated a settlement that involved a serious change of business practices at Equifax, a significant payout to meaningfully compensate victims, and a chocolate cake for every retired librarian in Tallahassee, I'd be slightly confused but I would be unequivocally happier with that settlement than the current one. While you could probably save a bit of money on the chocolate cakes, it would be much smaller than any of the other amounts in the case, and saving that money wouldn't have any real impact on the settlement actually doing what it needed to do.
It's not like there was some busy public defender that didn't have time to think "gee, these people deserve more than a couple bucks and the company is probably going to make money off this 'fine' once the yearly renewal kicks in for those that opted for the coverage how can we argue a stronger deal" there was a high end team that made bank on a deal they knew they were the only ones making real money on regardless of what the deal was.
I'll be honest, as a victim, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with $125, either. I expect most people will spend it on themselves, but even spending it on credit monitoring doesn't actually fix the problem, it just makes the problem a little less bad, maybe, at the cost of enriching other companies that depend on this ecosystem of profiting off other people's data. I would genuinely prefer a settlement that cost Equifax $800M and got me nothing to one that cost $80M and got me $125.
If the lawyers had instead negotiated a settlement that got them fees of $800 million, then, because as you say the fees come out of the settlement amount, the settlement would have to be at least $800 million. That would be good for me, as a victim, because it would have meant a larger penalty to Equifax.
" Net income attributable to Equifax of $299.8 million was down 49 percent compared to the full year 2017. " https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/equifax-releases-fo...
Apparently the CEO got $20 million in salary.
Edit: The more relevant number is the $6 million the CTO got!
Man I suck: At least the Chief Information Security Officer got less than $4 million.